Twitter joins Linux Foundation’s fight for open source software

Twitter and Linux, sitting in a tree, c-o-d-i-n-g.

Twitter has joined the Linux Foundation, making its commitment to open source software just a bit more official. Like many operators of high-traffic websites, Twitter relies on open source throughout its data centers, with Linux servers hosting workloads and software projects that make it easier to handle big data and serve up Web content.

The Linux Foundation funds development of the Linux kernel and acts as an emissary on behalf of the technology, while relying on corporate sponsorship from many prominent IT companies that use or build open source software. Twitter joined as a silver member, paying $15,000 for the privilege. The Linux Foundation announced Twitter’s membership today as it gears up for next week’s annual LinuxCon conference in San Diego.

Twitter courted controversy with developers recently with API changes that impose new restrictions on developers of third-party applications. But Twitter Open Source Manager Chris Aniszczyk said joining the Linux Foundation is unrelated and has been in the works for a while.

Twitter is no newbie in the open source world. It uses MySQL to store tweets, and develops its own publicly released fork. Twitter likewise makes heavy use of Memcached and releases its own fork called Twemcache. Cassandra, Hadoop, Lucene, and Pig are other open source tools used within Twitter’s infrastructure. Open source projects created by Twitter include Iago, a load generator for testing services before they hit production; Zipkin, a distributed tracing system; and Scalding, a Scala library that makes it easier to write MapReduce jobs in Hadoop. Twitter is also a sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation and recently joined the World Wide Web Consortium.

Twitter joining the Linux Foundation shows "just how important Linux is becoming to so many of these large scale-out Internet companies that essentially run on Linux and are working to build their infrastructure almost entirely on open source software,” Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin told Ars.

Google is another big Web company that is part of the foundation. One missing name is Facebook, but Zemlin hopes to get Mark Zuckerberg and team on board as well. "We would love to have them as a member," Zemlin said. "They do participate in our events around the Open Compute Project so that’s a good thing. Their business runs on Linux as well."

Promoted Comments

As the person who runs Twitter's Open Source Office, this has been in the works for awhile, it just happens to be that LinuxCon is next week (you should go if you can). All I have to say is that we use a lot of open source software and when we plan new engineering projects at Twitter, we always make sure to measure our requirements against the capabilities of open source offerings, and prefer to consume open source software whenever it makes sense. We consume a lot of Linux, so we think it makes sense to pay it forward and take part of the Linux Foundation.

We just established an Open Source Office about a year ago with a mission to support a variety of open organizations that are important to us. We’re grateful to the open source community for their contributions, and want to maintain a healthy, reciprocal relationship. We even open source a lot of our code on GitHub that helps power the service or crazy side projects: http://twitter.github.com/

In the end, as we evolve as a company, our commitment to open source continues to increase because it makes business sense and it's the right thing to do. I think more businesses should do the same.

As the person who runs Twitter's Open Source Office, this has been in the works for awhile, it just happens to be that LinuxCon is next week (you should go if you can). All I have to say is that we use a lot of open source software and when we plan new engineering projects at Twitter, we always make sure to measure our requirements against the capabilities of open source offerings, and prefer to consume open source software whenever it makes sense. We consume a lot of Linux, so we think it makes sense to pay it forward and take part of the Linux Foundation.

We just established an Open Source Office about a year ago with a mission to support a variety of open organizations that are important to us. We’re grateful to the open source community for their contributions, and want to maintain a healthy, reciprocal relationship. We even open source a lot of our code on GitHub that helps power the service or crazy side projects: http://twitter.github.com/

In the end, as we evolve as a company, our commitment to open source continues to increase because it makes business sense and it's the right thing to do. I think more businesses should do the same.

Probably, but still, this benefits everyone. Open source users get better software, which forces commercial software companies to innovate more to keep up.

But my real question is, where is Twitter getting this money? From what I understand, they still don't have a reliable revenue stream. But then again, I don't use Twitter, so perhaps I'm out of the loop.

dawesdust_12 wrote:

They're just trying to gain some publicity after the really ironic move of making their own social network more closed and less open for developers.

Looks like the commenters above have done a fairly good job of justifying the Twitter hate, so I'm just gonna ask this - coding is a six-letter word, how do you even sing it (from the article's byline)?

They're just trying to gain some publicity after the really ironic move of making their own social network more closed and less open for developers.

++ using linux is hardly something that needs to be congratulated in 2012.

But maintaining a public fork of MySQL with various improvements really does deserve congratulations. They're under no legal obligation to share that stuff, and it takes a lot of work (I'm speaking as someone who does it on a much smaller scale, because my boss isn't willing to dedicate much employee time to open source).

While joining the linux foundation is a minor plus, it still doesn't eliminate the colossal failure from the new API regulations/requirements/totalitarianism. Twitter has been rapidly sliding into irrelevancy for me after that happened. MySpace won't be so lonely in the future, I guess.

Do have high hopes for heello though - if their future API pans out, I'd gladly switch to (and develop for) their service, and leave twitter to the spam accounts.

Meh. It's not much to join apparently... While this token gesture is appreciated, this is greatly overshadowed by their attempts to lock down their service. Twitter ain't all it cracked up to be. When will the world wake up and start using open social network sites (It's possible, diaspora!)

They're just trying to gain some publicity after the really ironic move of making their own social network more closed and less open for developers.

How is that ironic? It's what big companies do. The ironic move is the subsequent move here of supporting the open source movement afterwards, but that's not the case either as you rightly point out it is just a PR move to make them look better.

I can't say I am really happy at the recent move of Twitter to restrict usage of their APIs. But I am not really suffering from it, either as a developer or as a (professionally) heavy user of them.

On the other hand, I think it is a good move by Twitter to show their support for the tools that are running their data-centers, even though $15k is pocket change. At least, they are much better at this than a lot of large companies in this industry, even though they could do a much better job.

So you can paint me as "meh" either way: can do better, could have done worse. As long as companies don't really realize that supporting actively OSS is really externalizing the maintenance costs of their non-core-business software to the community, and represents a huge benefit (in the $100k a year at the very least for a company like Twitter) that is worth financially supporting with hard cash, they will get a "meh" rating from me.

...prefer to consume open source software whenever it makes sense. We consume a lot of Linux, so we think it makes sense to pay it forward and take part of the Linux Foundation.

Slightly off-topic, but for the record, you don't 'consume' software. And similarly, content is also never 'consumed'. It is watched/read/interacted with/used/enjoyed/etc.

I really wish this modern habit of referring to creative works which are stored on digital media as being 'consumed' would stop. Not only is it factually and logically incoherent, but it subtly redefines these works as 'consumables', which fundamentally undermines the work that goes in to making them.

...prefer to consume open source software whenever it makes sense. We consume a lot of Linux, so we think it makes sense to pay it forward and take part of the Linux Foundation.

Slightly off-topic, but for the record, you don't 'consume' software. And similarly, content is also never 'consumed'. It is watched/read/interacted with/used/enjoyed/etc.

I really wish this modern habit of referring to creative works which are stored on digital media as being 'consumed' would stop. Not only is it factually and logically incoherent, but it subtly redefines these works as 'consumables', which fundamentally undermines the work that goes in to making them.

To take it a step further, it also implies to the purchaser that it is theirs only temporarily, which is more than a subtle shift.

Looks like the commenters above have done a fairly good job of justifying the Twitter hate, so I'm just gonna ask this - coding is a six-letter word, how do you even sing it (from the article's byline)?

Yeah I thought about adding an extra d, but then I decided to just go with it.

Meh. It's not much to join apparently... While this token gesture is appreciated, this is greatly overshadowed by their attempts to lock down their service. Twitter ain't all it cracked up to be. When will the world wake up and start using open social network sites (It's possible, diaspora!)

When those sites gain the features that people want and catch their attention. All of the recent wave of "geek rage" social network sites have at least one thing in common: terrible branding. What the F is an app.net? A diaspora? An identi.ca? They're all terrible names. Facebook, Myspace, Twitter all simple names that come pretty close to telling you have the site is about and (fairly) catchy names as well.

Meh. It's not much to join apparently... While this token gesture is appreciated, this is greatly overshadowed by their attempts to lock down their service. Twitter ain't all it cracked up to be. When will the world wake up and start using open social network sites (It's possible, diaspora!)

So some people definitely use Twitter like a social network. The vast majority of people (and I believe this is confirmed by twitter's own stats, but I can't remember where I read that) use it completely passively. They follow a bunch of people they find interesting and then dip in and out of this stream of... water cooler chatter. It's like listening to office gossip, except your office is made up of all your heroes (or all the people you're perversely curious about).

This is, incidentally, how I use it. I have some friends on there, and I will very occasionally say something, but mostly I follow a bunch of people I think are awesome (it feels creepy to say some Ars staff are on there... I'm waaaattcchhiinnng yoouuuuuu) or interesting, some of who are people I know who have turned out awesome, and some who are people I've never met.

The point I'm making is: twitter is a cable TV company, and Justin Beiber* is Breaking Bad. It doesn't matter how many other cable TV providers there are, if they don't have Breaking Bad no one is going to watch them.

*By using his name I'm referring to his undeniable popularity. I you find that offensive feel free to mentally replace his name with someone you'd rather have associated with that show.

Looks like the commenters above have done a fairly good job of justifying the Twitter hate, so I'm just gonna ask this - coding is a six-letter word, how do you even sing it (from the article's byline)?

Yeah I thought about adding an extra d, but then I decided to just go with it.

Just bounce on the N a little bit, extending it to 2 syllables ("EH-n"), and it works.